The Dumplin' Dumbash Page

When you're a fundy -- or a fundy atheist, as Dumplin' Dumbash is -- skilled rationalization is always necessary for your intellectual survival. We've gigged Dumpy for a vast number of errors here, including errors of presumption, such as where he said:

Reacting to the suggestion that the New Testament is unreliable because the documents weren’t written until long after the events they describe, G&T seem to be assuming that if they can make the documents sound close enough to the A.D. 30’s, they will have proven that the documents are reliable

And I replied:

"Seem to be assuming"? No, Dumplin’, they never say that ANYWHERE. They’re just answering the objection that they are late and therefore unreliable, you moron.

Dumplin' has the tradition of Clinton down pat as he winsomely says that it depends on what we mean by "is":

My very first sentence opens with the acknowledgment that G&T were "[r]eacting to the suggestion that the New Testament is unreliable because the documents weren’t written until long after the events they describe." The point Holding misses, however, is that they are not just answering the objection I opened with, they are presenting their material as though an early date for the manuscripts establishes the reliability of the New Testament.

Oh, sure! That DEFINITELY covers that "seem to be assuming" which Dumplin' gratuitously inserts into G and T's text, doesn't it? Bottom line: Dumpy got caught inserting a red herring and is now desperately trying to weasel out of it like the mental 2 year old he is. That he did happen to ALSO get the right objection doesn't erase the lie, President Bill Dumplin'. And the second part ("they are presenting their material as though...") is just another version of the false "seem to be assuming" argument. You're a liar, Dumplin'. Like Prez Bill, you've been caught in the Oval Office with your pants down.

From here, Dumplin' goes on a long skein in which he tries to strain the "seem to be assuming" camel out of G and T's semantic gnat, but he is never quite able to find an actual place where G and T equate lack of distance with automatic reliability. The best he can do is try to wrest it our of an OUTLINE (!) in which "early testimony" is listed as an "evidence" for historical reliability. This is still not the automatic equation Dumplin' tries to force-read into the text. Indeed, Dumplin' can't even see that this statement he quotes disallows his automatic connection:

1. Do we have early testimony? Generally, the earlier the sources, the more accurate is the testimony.

See that word "generally", Dumplin'? That means G and T recognize that it is NOT them "presenting the early dates of the NT manuscripts as though these dates were evidence that the NT is accurate." WRONG. They are arguing that early dates FAVOR a judgment of reliability, VERSUS late dates (which the critics assign to the documents). Not that early dates AUTOMATICALLY render a document reliable. No matter how Dumplin' tries to spin it, he's a liar, and he's been caught hoisting rotten red herrings above his head. He can't answer the real arguments, and he's too dumb to grasp the scholarship to do so, so he makes up a false argument to ascribe to G and T.

Next up is my correction of Dumplin' on oral tradition:

Um, NO, Dumplin'. Having now read more than 50 books on the subject, I can say without qualification that you are stupid in this regard. The process of legend creation and the process of crafting for memory are two different things. The former is growth; the latter involves trimming and shaping in a LITERARY fashion. And it doesn’t result in distortion of the facts for at least a couple of generations, when the tradition may be modified so that it can be more understandable to later generations. That doesn’t apply to the NT.

His head firmly planted in his buttocks, Dumplin' pleads for another Screwball Award:

Isn’t that great? Real world evidence does not matter, all that matters is how many BOOKS you’ve read. And the person who has read the most books is thereby qualified to call the other guy "stupid in this regard." And because all those books have made him so smart, he knows that at least two generations—anywhere from 32 to 100+ years, depending on how you define a generation—will need to pass before any factually-distorted, commonly-reported stories arise about 9/11, or the Holocaust, or the Columbine shootings, or the Iraq war, or the most recent Benny Hinn crusade, etc., etc. (Sunday Toons just write themselves, don’t they?)

Well, to quote another President, "There you go again!" Read carefully, Dumplin': I am not answering an argument that legends can't arise in a short period, you pus-brained moron. I am correcting your ignorant, false equation between "creation of legend" in oral tradition versus craftsmanship for the sake of memorization in oral tradition. Dumplin' whines that he did not say they were the same thing; no, Dumplin', in your ignorance of oral tradition and disdain for books, that is exactly what you did. You confused the two aspects because you are STUPID. Which is what happens when you disdain scholarship and books and stick your head between the buttocks of your "real world" experience.

So it boils down to this. Dumplin' is an idiot on the subject of oral tradition and testimony; I am NOT "creating a false dichotomy" that :either the NT story became a legend by the specific, multigenerational process(es) described in his beloved books, or else it was faithfully and accurately preserved by the specific process(es) of oral tradition described by those same books." I am, rather, correcting Dumplin's idiotic confusion of two concepts, and have not even touched yet the issue of historicity. I am presently working on expanded material on oral tradition and testimony, and it is THAT which shows up Dumpy as an ignoramus on the subject. A person who says things like this:

The ultimate test for accuracy is not whether the story can be made consistent with years of scholarly arguments by those intent on defending the story, but whether or not the story is consistent with real-world truth.

...is manifestly an egocentric twit living in an egocentric solar system. As usual, with Dumplin' it all devolves back to the same old tired hobbyhorse, "Waaaah, God doesn't kiss my butt." Always and forever, it is Dumplin's contrived expectations of God's performance in the "real world" (his kindergarten fantasies) that he falls back on; his incorrect, sentimentalist definitions of Biblical words like "love" (which he tendentiously and ignorantly posits as the "standard of divine behavior set by the original version", and his repeated disdain for credentialed scholarship.

Such is the sorrowful life of the fundamentalist atheist.